(ThyBlackMan.com) For Africans/Black people in the U.S., it is important to understand the links between our oppression in the U.S. and the exploitation of Africa including the Democratic Republic of Congo. Globally, it will be Congo Week 2025 soon and Congo Week “is more than a series of events—it’s a call to watch, listen, and act together. Every participation strengthens the voice of those fighting for peace, justice, and dignity in the Democratic Republic of Congo.”
The 2025-26 NBA season is coming up. Over the past decade, NBA players largely led by the face of the league, LeBron James, have been the male professional athletes most likely to be publicly outspoken regarding social issues compared to their MLB, NHL, and NFL counterparts. It makes sense that given a significant percentage of the African/Black athletes currently in the NBA grew up in backgrounds that were not “middle class” that they encountered the multitude of problems brought on by structural racism in their lives directly or indirectly via their family members and friends. While the NBA hasn’t had a Colin Kaepernick-type outspoken athlete over the past decade, various NBA players have weighed in on social issues such as police brutality of unarmed African/Black people and being critical of Donald Trump.
The NBA as a league leaned into the social justice theme especially during the historic year of 2020. For the league itself, that doesn’t reflect the same leadership and ownership demographics of most of the NBA players, so it is critical for stability to support the causes the NBA players feel are important even if those causes are related to the “controversial” topic of structural racism. In the year 2025, the NBA as a league is facing a different type of pressure as it relates to African/Black issues and it is on a global scale.
The government of Rwanda and Rwanda’s president Paul Kagame has developed a partnership with the NBA in recent years including the NBA’s Basketball Africa League. Rwanda, with the NBA partnership, have faced accusations that they are using sport to divert attention from Kagame’s horrific human rights record, a practice known as “sportswashing.” Rwanda, backed by Western powers such as the U.S. has been a destabilizing force in the Democratic Republic of Congo, providing material support to proxy militias like the M23 to undermine Congolese sovereignty and facilitate the extraction of abundance of resources in that region.
Last year, two U.S. senators, Republican Marsha Blackburn and Democrat Jeff Merkley, wrote to the NBA accusing it of “putting profit over principle” by forging close relations with the Rwandan government. Earlier this year, the NBA announced the creation of a new award, The NBA Africa Dikembe Mutombo Global Humanitarian Award, in honor of late NBA great Dikembe Mutombo, who died of brain cancer in September 2024. Mutombo was native to the DRC and did humanitarian work throughout his life there.
There is pressure from organizations in the U.S. to end the NBA’s relationship with Rwanda and Kagame. Every Black NBA player born in the U.S. should care about this situation as well. Malcolm X made it clear the links between Black people in the U.S. and those in the Congo when he said in 1965.
“The Congo is where they told me and you we came from. All my life, when I was a little boy, they said we came out of Africa, and they made believe we came out of the Congo, because that was supposed to be the most savage part of Africa. So you know, we’re probably more closely related to the brothers in the Congo than anybody else. And when you hear them talking about cannibals, they’re talking about our cousins, about our brothers, you know. If you really want to believe it. But they aren’t any more cannibalistic in the Congo than they are in the downtown, there in the Village. There’s some real cannibals down there in the Village. They’ll be eating up anything, you know. In this country what they try and make it appear is that the people in the Congo are savages. And they do this very skillfully in order to justify their being over there.”
Staff Writer; Mark Hines
